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I feel that artificial intelligence will play the largest role in my personal teaching career due to being a special education teacher. According to the article I have linked, AI will continue to play a large role in spec ed because of its ability to differentiate and individualize the student's experiences in education. It can significantly help by analyzing data and then determining specific needs of each student without human bias. I look forward to utilizing this technology to better serve my students.

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Educational technology is not a new concept, technology has been widely used in education for decades. However, like in every other area of our lives from shopping to the dating, AI has infiltrated in education and started to be taking it one step further.

Nowadays, there are plenty of AI based applications tailored for people's educational needs such as learning new languages or improving knowledge in different areas. The strengths of AI, mainly its personalizing, differentiating, and self-improving nature, make it a highly rewarded concept for education. The companies who embrace the AI challenge early on are already reaping incredible advantages over education sector.
Special Education for Specials
AI is especially influential for children who need special education. These children mostly have one type of learning disability, so they have some impairments in social skills like language and communication or they have trouble in reading, writing and math. Having all this in mind, it is obvious that the traditional one-size-fits-all approach is not applicable for children taking special education. More specifically, for example, autism is a spectrum which children with autism are so different from each other in their impairments and social skills. Because of their uniqueness, education that they take should be different from each other to be effective.

Developing fully intelligent education tools and new virtual teaching assistants will take time for sure. But given the current technological advancements, here is the five changes AI is already making on special education market today:

Personalized Education for every other child

First and foremost, educative applications with AI are highly personalized and entertaining for children rather than just being didactic, consequently, children can learn at their own paces while enjoying. It is obvious that the traditional one-size-fits-all approach is not applicable for children taking special education. Because they don't have any classmate on the app, they cannot compare themselves to others and can feel more confident. Additionally, they can continue learning wherever they want without any time constraint contrary to traditional education.

When we look at the consequences of using AI based educative apps, many studies show that by taking children's attention and increasing the duration of concentration, technological education help children to understand easier and learn better than just schooling. Considering a regular attention span of a child with special needs is around 5-10 minutes, it is wiser to use AI as an assistant to the traditional education.

Differentiation and Individualized Shape

Artificial intelligence help children with special needs to reach their real potential by individualized training and focusing more on the areas which they specifically need to improve. For these children, AI can determine what they need and what they are interested in by analyzing learner's tests and responses. The characteristics of the learners like age or levels of impairments can change their pace and manner of learning, therefore AI determines the learner characteristics and specializes the process for every individual. Besides shaping the process, parents and teachers can follow the improvements of their children and students and step in the process when they need the help of AI based apps.
What is the next?
With the current state of technology, there is still a lot to go. Good news is, the opposite of this is true as well. AI based special educational apps, like this one an autism brother developed, are utilizing games, creating better educational materials and getting results with great effect. They save time, improve people's lives, cheaper than therapy sessions and provide a much better experience for the special children. In time, AI will fully revolutionize the Special Education sector as well.

... Read More

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AI Has Already Started Reshaping Special Education

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Educational technology is not a new concept, technology has been widely used in education for decades. However, like in every other area of our lives from shopping to the dating, AI has infiltrated in education and started to be taking it one step further.

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Monday May 31st Prompt

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New Resource from Discussion Posts: Wizer.me

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New Resource from Discussion Posts: Wizer.me

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I had never heard of Wizer until this discussion assignment. I am always looking for resources that will help my elementary students become more adept and efficient with technology (as well as myself). This resource allows me to convert PDFs into interactive worksheets. I found a youtube video that I have attached that explains how to do a basic conversion. It will also allow me to insert videos and audio. I love this feature due to having students with accommodations that include reading test questions and answers aloud. I am looking forward to trying this next school year with my special ed students.

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Wizer Activate - Easily convert your PDF worksheet to Wizer Worksheet

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There are so many ways to use AR and VR in the classroom. I am really excited to see what the future holds with regard to experiences in the classroom. One way in which I could see significant benefit from the use of VR in the classroom is virtual field trips. I work in a title 1 school in an area of low income and high poverty levels. My students rarely get opportunities to visit places or go on vacations and experience things outside of our own community. VR field trips would allow my students to gain experiences that would help them build background knowledge that would, in turn, help them make text to self connections.

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10 Reasons To Use Virtual Reality In The Classroom

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Virtual reality in the classroom can be used to facilitate student interactions or environments to create experiences not otherwise possible.

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Adaptive Technology in my school building

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Adaptive Technology in my school building

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In math, we often use Reflex math to help students with math fact fluency. This is a great app that allows students to earn coins and "shop". As a special education teacher I have often used this to help me progress monitor for specific math goals. It can be set up to work on all 4 operations or tailored to 1 specific operation.
For reading, we do not have as much available to us that is adaptive. This is something I would like to see more of in our building. We use the Lexia program for our ESOL population, but our special ed students do not have access to adaptive technology in regards to reading.

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I live in a rural farm community. When the pandemic hit and we shut down schools, our communities were not able to keep up with the demands of online learning. Many of our parents had to request paper packets of school assignments which them put extra work on staff.
We are a one to one technology school district which means every student has an iPad to use. During the shut down this did not help any students who did not have access to internet. Our board of commissions has worked to integrate more access points for our students, creating hot spots in various areas such as school parking lots or local store areas. This is still a problem because students do not always have someone that can drive them to these areas to be a part of the class online. This is usually our lowest income families that have these issues, creating a divide in student performance. Our students who have adequate access to internet are able to keep up with their assignments. The ones who do not, are continuing to fall behind. The only way to provide true digital equity is to provide internet directly into all of our students' homes so that they have continuous access to class content without relying on anyone to take them somewhere.